Fine Dining, Snowflakes, and a Famous Lodge

The Ahwahnee Chefs' Holidays gather together over two dozen top toques.

Receive the latest worth-the-drive updates in your inbox

FAMOUS CHEFS, IN PERSON: Cable series and reality television has done a lot for the food world over the last decade. We now intimately know about the kitchen practices of restaurants in faraway locales we've never been to, and we know what lauded cooks and sommeliers have been through, personally, on the way to fame. It has been a positive thing, the profusion of foodie-forward shows, but it can sometimes lend the sense that well-known chefs and eatery owners and edible inventors only gather together behind the screen and never in public. You can see a chef in her own restaurant, but seeing a few, together? It is the stuff of reality TV, or so it can seem. But events like Chefs' Holidays have been around longer than those series, meaning that the very top toques in the business do find spots to convene at, where they may cook, teach, and talk with fans and other aspiring foodologists. The Ahwahnee series, which unfurls, grandly, over eight two- to three-day sessions, returns for its 29th year this winter, bringing with it three lovely things: food, the people who make and like it, and winter in Yosemite National Park.

CHEFS AND EVENTS ANNOUNCED:The Ahwahnee has released the full line-up, and, as in past Chefs' Holidays, the roster is packed as pate inside a roasted fowl. Session 2, for example, will be moderated by food journalist Janice Wald Henderson, while Hosea Rosenberg, the winner of Top Chef Season 5, will headline. Kim Alter of Oakland's Plum and Daniel Holzman of New York's Meatball Shop will demo. Intrigued? That happens on Wednesday, Jan. 15 and Thursday, Jan. 16.

Two-night packages at The Ahwahnee start at $449 (per person), but Yosemite Lodge at the Falls is another stay-over choice. If you're all about fine vittles, wintertime, food-centered hobnobbing, and seeing celebrated chefs off-screen and in-person, this nearly three-decade-old confab might be your savory bag.

Chefs' Holidays at The Ahwahnee open on Jan. 12 and wrap on Feb. 6, 2014.